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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

For those of you who missed the news, Pri-Med acquired Amazing Charts EHR for a currently undisclosed amount. This was a really interesting move in the EHR industry. Anne Zieger suggested that this and other indicators was a sign of EMR consolidation. Turns out there’s a lot more behind the Pri-Med acquisition of Amazing Charts than most people would see on the surface.

In a call I had with Amazing Charts founder and president Dr. Jonathan Bertman, as well as John Mooney, founder and CEO of Pri-Med, I learned a lot about why this acquisition makes sense and how they’re planning to capitalize on the investment.

CME Chart Level Review
One of the most interesting things I learned was that chart level review was the best way to see the gaps and needs that can be satisfied by CMEs. Considering Pri-Med is a major player in the CME space, you can see the value that having relationships with a bunch of doctors using an EHR can be for them. I didn’t dive into how Pri-Med plans to leverage the Amazing Charts EHR charts, but you can see the possibilities. Although, Amazing Charts is a mostly client-server based EHR, so Pri-Med won’t have any access to do chart level reviews without permission from the doctors using the EHR.

Protecting EHR Data
In fact, in my discussion I learned that Dr. Bertman and John Mooney both had no interest in using a physician’s EHR data to make money. That philosophy actually seemed to bring Pri-Med and Amazing Charts together to make this acquisition happen. Both believe that their company should make money providing the software and services a doctor needs as opposed to making money off the data in an EHR. This is nothing new since I’ve heard Dr. Bertman espouse this belief many times before, but does contrast with other EHR vendors in the market.

EHR Acquisition Options
I was also fascinated to hear about Dr. Bertman’s thoughts on Amazing Charts approach to acquisition. He said that he didn’t want Amazing Charts users to experience what other EHR users had experienced when their EHR was acquired by another EHR company. He didn’t want Amazing Charts to be one of many EHR software in a company’s portfolio. Inevitably, EHR software will get sunset to streamline the company and Dr. Bertman didn’t want that for his users.

What does the Acquisition Mean for Users?
Ont thing users of Amazing Charts can expect is efforts to create clinical training and information at the point of care. John Mooney mentioned their “5 Minute Clinical Consults” as a model of short education that could be integrated into the clinical documentation process. I’ll be interested to see how this evolves. Even 5 minutes seems too long for most doctors to stop their patient workflow. However, it is interesting to bring Pri-Med’s education knowledge, experience and library to the point of care in the Amazing Charts EHR.

I also was fascinated by John Mooney’s suggestion of Amazing Charts possibly integrating a Provider Self Assessment tool into Amazing Charts. Definitely makes sense to have the doctors self assess to get the best CME. While not a perfect match inside an EHR software, it doesn’t seem completely out of place in the EHR if it’s done right.

Amazing Charts User Groups at Pri-Med Events
I also learned that they’ll be working to hold Amazing Charts user group meetings at the various Pri-Med events. This could be a great boon for Amazing Charts users. I know a lot of doctors and their staff won’t or can’t attend the national user group meetings that most EHR vendors hold. I’m not sure where the 6500 Amazing Charts users are found throughout the country, but if planned well it would be great to leverage the existing Pri-Med events for this and engage more of their EHR users close to home.

Post-Acquisition Logistics
They told me that Amazing Charts would maintain a separate entity in Rhode Island to continue developing and supporting the EHR software. Their marketing and sales would come out of Boston where Pri-Med is located. For Amazing Charts users, this sounds like it will be mostly business as usual from their perspective. In fact, it could mean Amazing Charts has more resources available to build our their EHR software. All in all, this seems like a smart move for Amazing Charts and their users.

Full Disclosure: Amazing Charts is an advertiser on this site, but you can be sure I’d cover every EHR acquisition I can find.

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